EMMANUEL LEVINAS (1906-1995), philosopher and Talmudic commentator, born in Kaunas, Lithuania, naturalized French in 1930.

In 1923, he
began to study philosophy at Strasbourg University, where he came
into contact with Charles Blondel, Maurice Halbwachs, Maurice Pradines
and Henri Carteron. It was also during these student years that
Levinas began his lifelong friendship with Maurice Blanchot.

In 1928, he
went to Freiburg University to pursue studies in phenomenology under
Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg he also encountered Martin Heidegger,
whose Being and Time (1927) was to have a profound and lasting
influence on his thought. Levinas’s debt to both masters was evident
in his first three major publications: TheTheory of Intuition
in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930), Existence and Existents (1947), and En Découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et
Heidegger (1949).

In France, Levinas
won early acclaim as one of the foremost exponents of the work of
Husserl, and was read by Jean-Paul Sartre among others. After the
second World War, most of which was spent in captivity, Levinas
frequented the avant-guard philosophical circles of Gabriel Marcel
and Jean Wahl.

It was mainly
during the fifties that Levinas began to work out a highly original
philosophy of ethics with the aim of going beyond the ethically
neutral tradition of ontology. Levinas’s first magnum opus, Totality
and Infinity (1961), influenced in part by the dialogical philosophies
of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber, sought to accomplish this
departure through an analysis of the "face-to-face" relation
with the Other. At the center of the work is the claim that the
Other is not knowable, but calls into question and challenges the
complacency of the self through Desire, language, and the concern
for justice. This claim and others were further elaborated in Levinas’s
second magnum opus, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), an immensely challenging and sophisticated work that seeks
to push philosophical intelligibility to the limit in an effort
to lessen the inevitable concessions made to ontology and the tradition.
It is this work that is generally considered Levinas's most important
contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure
of metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by Jacques Derrida,
for example.